With His Crazy Hat, Pharrell Normalized Weird Fashion

Looking back on the Vivienne Westwood hat that propelled red carpet dressing into its eccentric present.

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On January 26, 2014, Pharrell Williams out-Pharrelled even Pharrell. That night, he appeared on the Grammy’s red carpet in jeans, undone Timberland boots, a red leather Adidas track jacket—and a totally demented and giant hat.

Williams’s hat remains one of the most legendary moments in fashion history. Forget controversial—people didn’t even know what to make of it in the first place. Was it funny? Was it ugly? Was it genius? Was it a grail so advanced that no one could hope to understand? As it turned out, the hat would be revealed as all of the above. But in the moment, all we knew was that the hat’s cowboy-goldminer-I’m-thinkin’-Arby’s vibe clashed with the standard look of Official Cool Guy Spokesman Pharrell, to say nothing of tuxedoed awards show attendee. In one of the first and finest examples of brands tweeting like people, Arby’s asked the musician for their hat back. Shortly thereafter, someone else started an entire account dedicated to tweeting both as, and about, the hat.

Within 24 hours, the Twitterati had identified the hat as a signature accessory, the Buffalo Hat, from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s first official fashion show, Autumn/Winter’s 1983 “Nostalgia of Mud.” That show catapulted them from the anti-establishment kids behind Sid Vicious’s safety pins to full-on Paris runway disruptors with a collection of soft-tailored layers in a dusty palette. McLaren said at the time that this was his attempt "to show in clothes and music that, in the post-industrial age, the roots of our culture lie in primitive societies”; you can see how the hat is like a blown-up bowler with a cowboy hat brim, but its dented, molded crown makes it look somehow humane instead of ridiculous and swaggery, at least in the context of that initial show.

Williams’s unusual combination of a red track jacket with the hat was traced back to the music video for “Buffalo Girl,” a single McLaren made with The World’s Famous Supreme Team, in which members of the hip hop group wore the hat with Adidas tracksuits. (Admittedly, Williams’s combination doesn’t work so smoothly: the jeans are too fitted, too so-clearly-2014, to look timeless enough to match the daring of the ensembles that inspired it.) So it wasn’t as out of left-field as it seemed. In essence, Williams was annotating a chapter of fashion history.

But then Williams did something weird: he just kept wearing The Hat. He wore The Hat to Nobu in London on February 6, with a gray fur-trim coat. He wore it later that month to an after-party for the BRIT Awards in London, establishing a uniform less for Williams than for The Hat: jeans, track or varsity jacket, and undone sneakers or boots. Earlier that night, he’d performed his nihilist chill-pill of a hit, “Happy,” in a pair of distressed plaid patchwork jeans by Junya Watanabe and a camel blazer, an outfit whose fashion credentials matched that of The Hat.

You may be surprised to learn that, in fact, Williams didn’t spend all of 2014 in The Hat. In March, he auctioned off The Hat he wore to the Grammys on eBay, where it sold for $44,100. The buyer was Arby’s. This seemed to mark the end of his affair with The Hat, and in an interview with Love Magazine that summer, Westwood’s partner and co-designer Andreas Kronthaler said Williams “wore it...to death, I think,” adding, “He’s stopped wearing it now. Good for him.”

In years since, Williams has returned to his dapper streetwear origins, thriving in the sweet spot between Bape and Chanel. Even the risky stuff he’s done since then, like his Chanel tuxedo in 2017, doesn’t have the same sense of improbability as his Arby’s-and-Adidas signature.

But Williams’s Year of Magical Hatting was one of the last vestiges of fashion’s Beta Red Carpet Years, when conservatism and insecurity defined award season dressing. It was Lupita Nyongo’s breakout year, which proved to actresses that you didn’t have to force yourself into a strapless fishtail mermaid dress to look like an award-winning actress. Virgil Abloh had launched Off-White just the year before, and John Galliano would take the helm at Maison Margiela that fall. Fashion in the public eye was about to enter its current golden age, when eccentricity would be encouraged rather than questioned. Come to think of it, The Hat wouldn’t look too bad, actually, with Billy Porter’s tuxedo dress.